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ShareGate, a truly easy way to migrate to SharePoint Online

Again it’s not my idea to push commercial products through this site. I have no stocks in ShareGate, unfortunately 😉 so I have no financial interest if you are going to use this product or not. But since migration is a daily part of Office 365 you need to know what’s out there. One of the success factors of ShareGate is that it’s built by a team led by a SharePoint MVP with years of experience in the field and the community, Benjamin Niaulin. This explains why a lot of the features that we need on a day to day basis are in the product.

Just a little overview of the features I think that are really interesting:

FileServer to SharePoint migration

SharePoint to SharePoint migration

Import/Export To SharePoint

MetaData Mapping

Bulk Editing MetaData

…

In my case I’m going to use it to migrate a FileServer to Office 365.

First things first, install ShareGate, you can download it from http://en.share-gate.com/

Once you’ve installed it, open the application and you should see this:

The feature I’m going to show in this tip is the Import to SharePoint, since I want to migrate my FileServer to Office 365. As soon as I push the button I receive a Wizard that helps me to define my migration flow:

I provide the url of my site collection and let the system know it’s an Office 365. I provide my credentials and off we go.

Connecting to Site provides with a nice Tree View of our SP Structure:

The destination library for my files is a library in a SubSite called ShareGate. Click on next.

Browse to the documents you want to migrate. In my example I have 2 folders I want to migrate BUT I want to flatten the Directories and provide the Full Path into MetaData, since I don’t like folders in a SharePoint Environment.

So I need to do a mapping of my Document Properties to a MetaData Field.

Next to Properties mapping, you can do ContentType mapping for SP to SP Migration, Permissions & Users mapping. I would really suggest you try these features too, because they are the reasons why the migrations with this tool are so powerful.

In my case I need to map Full Path on the MetaData Origin. It’s as easy as dropping a property on a list.

Ok, Configuration all done? Almost. Select the folders and documents you want to migrate. In my case toMigrate01 & toMigrate02. And click on Copy. The final step is to define or chose a template to migrate your data. If you want a 1-1 migration, you can select the Full Copy and you are ready to go. In my case where I want to flatten the folder structure I need to define my own template.

Create Custom Template

If you want to you can change the mapping in the next tab. In my case that’s not necessary so it remains as defined earlier.

Click Save (or Save and Start, if you want to select this template immediately) and select the template you want.

You’ll get a Confirmation with the choice between Interactive & Silent Mode. If you select the first one you’ll need to address every warning or error during the operation, with silent mode it will provide you with a settings screen where you can define how the system has to respond to warnings and errors.

When you click OK the system start copying your data. It will provide you with a splash screen keeping you up to date with all the information.

So we had some warnings, let’s see what the problems were and how we can solve them. When we click on Open Report we get a nice overview of the actions, warnings & errors per item.

If you want to, you can address this issues. In my case I don’t need to. Now let’s see what the result is:

So you see, migration is pretty easy as they claim in their marketing slogan. In this particular case I would have loved to be able to map the Folder Name on the Origin but that was not a possibility, maybe a nice to have in the future. (or I might overlooked it).